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Guest opinion: Incomplete analysis in the gun debate

By Doug Duncan

Posted:
01/30/2013 01:00:00 AM MST

The guest commentary "Gun regulations won't make a difference" by David Rubinstein in the January 25 Daily Camera is an example of the kind of incomplete and misleading analysis that one hears a lot in the gun debate. Governor John Hickenlooper even made the same mistake: talking about guns as if the only issue about them concerned fighting off criminals and the crime rate. But criminals are not the only one who use guns, and not the ones who do most of the killing!

Let's take a look at what Rubinstein focuses on and what he omits. Does having a gun increase the chance you will scare off a criminal? Most studies say yes, as he describes. So you might assume that if you keep a gun at home you would be safer. But you would be wrong. You are less safe, and much more likely to be killed. How can that be? Because most killings aren't done by criminals! The No. 1 cause of gun deaths in homes is suicides, No. 2 is shooting a relative or friend, and only No. 3 involves criminals. Rubinstein doesn't mention this problem at all. You can look up the death statistics yourself.

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A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that "people are 21 times more likely to be killed by someone they know than a stranger breaking into the house, and that keeping a gun at home increases your chance of dying 2.7 times." Another study in Washington, Tennessee, and Texas found that home guns were four times more likely to be involved in an accident, seven times more likely to be used in a criminal assault or homicide, and 11 times more likely to be used in an attempted or completed suicide than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense. Think honestly: did you ever say to yourself, "I'm so made at xxx I could kill him?" If you (or he!) can grab a gun that is more likely. There are over 30,000 suicides a year in the United States, a number that dwarfs mass shootings. If depressed people have access to a gun they can and often do use it to kill themselves.

The very broad claim by Rubinstein that gun regulations won't make any difference is opposed by the guest opinion of Paul Dougan in the Daily Camera three weeks ago. Dougan talked about the ban on assault weapons passed in Australia in 1996 after a mass shooting killed 35 people. There has not been a mass killing in Australia since. More important, however, as quoted by conservative ex-Australian Prime Minister John Howard (a strong supporter of George W. Bush) is that homicides fell and suicides fell even more. That suggests we would be wiser to study what Australia did than to ignore it.

The excellent book, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman says that research shows that it's harder to look up facts and think carefully than to accept what "seems true." But our intuitions are often wrong. I teach critical and scientific thinking to university students who are not science majors, and they learn to state questions clearly, differentiate between opinion and facts or data, and to avoid fooling themselves by choosing answers that seem intuitive but aren't supported by the facts. They are often shocked when I have them look up statistics such as "Are African Americans more likely to work in sports, or in science or medicine?" or "Which is safer to drive, a big pickup truck or a Toyota Camry?" So when you enter the gun debate, clarify what question you want answered. Do you want to scare off criminals? Feel powerful? Or make yourself less likely to be killed? The different questions have different answers.

That the NRA lobbies against studies of gun control effects suggests that they are not interested in your finding out the facts. But you still can.

Doug Duncan, of Boulder, is a faculty member in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences of the University of Colorado, and director of the Fiske Planetarium.

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